DARKSTALKERS TRIBUTE SNEAK-PEEK

Last year Udon Publishing produced a nice little art book called the STREET FIGHTER TRIBUTE. This book was a collection of hundreds of pieces of fan art based around Capcom's Street Fighter video game series, culled from submissions they received after putting out a call for entries. I had a couple of friends whose pieces were published in the book, and I would have loved to contribute, but I found out about the contest only a couple of days before the deadline and it was too late for me to submit anything.

A few months ago, I found out they were doing the same thing with Capcom's DARKSTALKERS game series (which I'm also a fan of), so I made sure to get started early so I wouldn't miss the deadline this time. I initially resolved to do several illustrations based on a few of my favorite characters, thinking I had plenty of time to complete at least three illustrations, increasing my chances of getting published. I sketched out poses and character designs and worked out 4 illustrations that I wanted to complete. Alas, my various freelance pursuits caught up with me and I was only able to finish one of the planned 4 pieces. So much for planning, but I gotta put the paying jobs first.

Anyway, the characters I chose to illustrate were Rikuo, Q-Bee, Hsien-Ko (my favorite), and Anakaris. I figured there would be a ton of entries featuring Morrigan and Felicia (probably the two most popular characters), so I wanted to avoid them. The one I managed to complete was Rikuo. I would have loved to finish Hsien-Ko, and I had a pretty cool pose for Q-Bee, but it wasn't meant to be.

I'm not going to post the whole image here, as Udon "recommends" against spoiling the images before the book is published, but I will provide a tiny peek (one of the inks and one of the colors), and you can bet I'll post the entire image here once the book is published (or sooner, if I find out the piece didn't make it in).

DONKEY KONG WINS!!

Finished polishing off my first DONKEY KONG illustration last night (though I may still tweak it here and there). Been working on this one for a while in my "spare time" (between 10pm and 3am), but I'm rather pleased with how it turned out. The coloring actually didn't take as long as I thought it would -- as usual, the added effects and details took a bit longer to hammer out than I'd have liked.

Apologies to all you Mario fans out there -- looks like the little-carpenter-that-could bit the barrel! That's right, "carpenter". Mario (or "jumpman" as he was known before being given a name) began his career as a carpenter before he was shamed out of the profession and had to learn plumbing from his brother, Luigi.

Apparently, Mario used to be a bit of a bad guy before Nintendo decided to polish up his image and pit him against King Koopa. I love the game DONKEY KONG, but couldn't we play as the gorilla instead? He's a much more sympathetic character once you know the story behind the game. Apparently, Mario kept DK as his pet, yet treated him poorly, keeping him locked up in a cage and perhaps beating him while the poor ape is forced to watch from behind bars as Mario incessantly makes out with his hot girlfriend, Pauline, right in front of the imprisoned beast! Can you blame him for busting out, kidnapping Pauline and tossing barrels and flaming fireballs at the creepy carpenter? I'd do the same thing! Mario was later recaptured, of course, only to have his son come and rescue him and take out Mario in the process. Is it any wonder DK went crazy and eventually holed up in a greenhouse, communing with insects (see DONKEY KONG 3)?

Anyway, this time, much to the distress of Pauline, Donkey Kong wins and Mario eats a barrel. Hooray! I wonder what ever happened to Pauline anyway? Mario seems to have taken the golddigger route, ditching the sassy lass for the royal Princess Toadstool. I think you made a big mistake, Mario -- sure the princess is loaded (except their currency is probably mushroom-based), but Pauline is way hotter! Your loss.

Critiques and feedback are appreciated, please. The second DONKEY KONG illustration is underway and I'll post more progress on that when applicable.

DONKEY KONG LOVES PAULINE!

Here's the final large drawing of Pauline and Donkey Kong for my 2nd DONKEY KONG based illustration, done over the weekend. Inks and colors coming soon.

MARIO!

Here's a quick peek at Mario for my second DONKEY KONG illustration, currently in-progress!

SNEAK PEEK AT "DONKEY KONG" COLORS!

Howdy, folks!
I'm in the thick of coloring my first DONKEY KONG piece, trying to fit it in between a few freelance jobs and other odds and ends. It's progressing quite smoothly and I thought I'd share a peek at it with you to fill in the gaps in my posting schedule.

DONKEY KONG UPDATE!

Things are moving along at a snail's pace with my 2 DONKEY KONG pieces. I'm in no hurry to get them done, and I can only work on them late at night after the freelance work is done. This is a cleaned-up pencil drawing of the first piece with some odds and ends adjusted and tightened up -- the most notable adjustment is the size and position of Pauline on DK's shoulder. She seemed a bit too large in the first pass.



Next is a tightened up sketch of the second layout with the background and setting elements fleshed-out and the positioning of the objects adjusted. I really like how these are both turning out, so maybe I won't feel the desire to go back and redo these in 6 months, as seems to happen with many of my pieces (if you call them "pieces" instead of "drawings" it makes you sound like a real artist).



Finally, there's a page of DK head studies that I forgot to include in an earlier post.



I'm also including a cool DONKEY KONG QUILT that my magic computer showed to me the other day. It's done by Carolina Patchworks. It's nearly there and I wish it was a more pixel-perfect translation, but hey -- it's a Donkey Kong quilt! That alone makes it cool.

Mo' Betta Donkey Kong!

Hey, here's some more DONKEY KONG drawings as I refine my images and slog towards the finish line. Freelance bidness is hampering my progress on this and I can only work on it during the dead of night after the day's work is done.
Still, progress is being made. I'm also working on some new button ideas in the meanwhile, but more on that later.

DONKEY KONG IS... STILL COMING!

More DONKEY KONG sketches from the ol' sketchbook, as well as some other cool samplings of DK fan-art.

Thorsten Hasenkam produced this first piece of fan art. Nicely produced piece with a seemingly oblivious Donkey Kong. Bonus points for being hand-painted, but I'd like to have seen a bit more relation between the characters of the piece. Seems like two separate images tossed together in the same frame. The pixellated blocks save it by tying the whole thing together from a design standpoint, if not thematically. I like his other work, too. His paintings feel like a fun mash-up of Glenn Barr and Shag.



Next up is a charming and adorable little hand-made Donkey Kong by Anna Chambers. All I gots to say about this one is "I want one!" Anna, let's trade!



Here's a fantastic feat of paper-engineering spearheaded by Ian Rickard. Some folks at the Jack Baskin school of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz built a huge-scale replica of the DK game board with about 14,000 post-it notes in 4 stories worth of windows in their Engineering building.
There's also a time-lapse video of them setting it up.



To round things out, I'm gonna close this chapter with one of the most bizarre reimaginings of Mario and his simian nemesis that I've come across. What's even more bizarre is that it is an officially licensed piece that was acually used as packaging art for an Intellivision game cartridge port. It's like they very loosely described the concept of the game to some freelance artist who'd never heard of such a thing as a "Donkey Kong" before. Mario seems to have ditched his job as a carpenter to become some sort of Mexican 90's superhero version of the god of thunder, complete with golden hammer, while the decidedly un-gorilla-like Donkey Kong holds the homely Pauline captive in some sort of boundless Tron-type laser-scape and hurls shiny untapped kegs of beer at our mullet-sporting hero! It's so bad, I want a poster of it! I should research this a bit and find out if there's an amusing story behind this piece of art.



More tomorrow!

DONKEY KONG is coming!!

I'm in the midst of working on preliminary sketches, character designs and layouts for my upcoming DONKEY KONG piece, based on another old arcade favorite of mine. I'm having a great time puzzling through interesting layouts and poses (there's so much more you can do with giant gorillas and valiant carpenters), and I have enough ideas to perhaps do 3 or 4 pieces, so we'll see how that goes.

I thought I'd share some of my sketchbook work. I don't usually share sketchbook scans and I don't really keep a traditional sketchbook, mainly cause I don't think my sketchbook stuff is any good. It takes some noodling on an idea before I get it the way I want it usually, and I'm trying to be a bit more loose and uninhibited with my sketching. More scans soon.

Accompanying my sketches are some DK tribute pieces I like by other artists that I came across whilst doing the ol' Google reference search (I also use something called "books"). I wanted to see what other artists had done with the Kong, and I wanted to make sure I wasn't treading on someone's toes by doing something too similar to another piece.

The first piece is a bit of fan-art by someone who goes by the name Question Josh. Simple, but a decidedly different and original interpretation. DK sort of reminds me of Homer Simpson in this one. Original image can be found here



The next piece is a twisted bit of eye-popping fun by Jorge R. Gutierrez. It's got a great style and an almost creepy metaphysical slant.



The new Donkey Kong Jenga game. I don't know how this works, but I want it!



More sketches tomorrow!

Q*BERT FINAL COLORS

Ah, the arcade classic Q*Bert. One of those fixtures of childhood whose memory is tinged with equal parts joy and frustration. I recall fondly the infrequent trips to the local mall, which meant at least three things: browsing at the toy store, having a rainbow sherbet cone melt all over my hand while I furiously licked away at it, and getting to take another crack or two at Q*bert at the arcade. I was never any good at Q*bert. I never had enough quarters at a time to gain any sort of mastery over it, and my height combined with the awkward diagonal joystick control (which completely clashed with my strict horizontal and vertical instinctive movements cemented by Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Frogger) left me helpless and frustrated in the shadow of Q*Bert's towering yellow arcade cabinet and alien foul language.

I've had a few occasions over the years to take additional cracks at the game, hoping that coming at it from a more seasoned gamer's level of experience would aid in my quest to help the poor orange fellow finally change the colors on all those doggone pyramids! Well, I certainly am not as bad at it as I used to be, but I'm still no expert. My love for the game and its mix of a simple goal, challenging tactics and bizarre creatures persists, however. I hope to one day own the arcade cabinet so I can perfect my game. I know there have been several console ports and flash adaptations of the game, but I don't recall any of them being exact reproductions of the arcade, and that's what I truly want.

Anyway, here's the final colored version of my Q*BERT piece. As I stated in the previous post, I've retooled Q*Bert, Coily, Sam, Slick, Ugg and Wrong-Way to bring them out of the 80's and more into the Pop-Monkey camp. And, yes, I turned Slick and Sam into pineapples with hands-for-feet. It just made sense to me.

Special thanks to Warren Davis, Jeff Lee and David Thiel, the co-creators of Q*BERT!
Check this site for a nice article on the history of Q*Bert: http://coinop.org/features/qbstory.aspx

PRINTS OF THIS PIECE ARE AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER! Just drop me a line for more info.

Q*Bert is copyright Sony Pictures

I'm Back In the Saddle Again! (And by "saddle", I mean "chair", though that's not nearly as exciting-sounding)

Holy jeez! I know, I know -- "Jared, we thought you died! What the heck happened to you?" Well, I clearly did not die, but that's not to say I didn't feel a bit dead for a while there. I was captured by a bounty hunter and delivered to Darth Vader, where I was frozen in carbonite for a spell. Luckily, Princess Leia came to rescue me from Jabba's palace before I was -- no, no, that's clearly a lie!
I'm not going to go into detail about my hibernation period, but I was occupied by my day job doing concept art for Automatic Pictures as well as trying to slog through an incredibly difficult and taxing period of my personal life. Things got very bad and very upsetting for a while, and my life has been turned nearly upside down as a result. I've come through it a better person with some rearranged priorities and outlooks, but things aren't necessarily all birds 'n' flowers now, either.

Regardless, I'm trying to get back on the wagon here, and I'm going to finish and freshen up all the projects I've let stagnate, as well as work on some new stuff I've had simmering in my cranial crock-pot for a while.

First up: a new video game-based piece involving a Pop-Monkey reimagining of another childhood arcade favorite of mine, Q-BERT! My Pac-Samurai print was a great success and attracted quite a bit of unexpected attention (and money), so I'm hoping the response to this will be just as good (preferably better). I'm busy working on the colors right now, but I thought I'd go ahead and post the preliminary pencils and stuff in the meanwhile.

Colors coming very soon!

"Pac-Samurai"

I loved the "ancient Pac-Man" concept so much, I was inspired to do another piece. This one is an attempt to merge my style with an old Japanese print style complete with faux-antique paper. Took me a bit longer to finish than I thought it would. Even though the color scheme is very flat, achieving that authentic old and worn look to it was a real bear. It's not a technique I'm used to utilizing in my work, and it's much more complicated than scanning in an old beat-up piece of paper and converting the artwork to "multiply" on top of it.

Er... what I meant to say is -- here's a recently discovered rare Japanese print which is rumored to have contributed to Toru Iwatani's inspiration for the genesis of Pac-Man. It was a print that had been in his family for generations, but had been lost in a warehouse shortly after his tragic suicide.

This piece, too, will be featured in the upcoming "Big Trouble in Little Gainesville" show at GORILLA RIOT'S STORE 101 this Friday (6/06/08). If you're in the area, come on by and tell me how full of it I am, and marvel in amazement as genuine concern nearly creeps in at the corners of my eyes.

PRINTS OF THIS PIECE ARE AVAILABLE!! $10 (plus $5 for US shipping), 11"X 17" 100# cover stock paper. EMAIL ME FOR MORE INFO!!